Golden Apple Island Page 14

  Fran said, ‘Yes, well—I think Mr. Jervis has telephoned you about me—Fran Page? I was coming out to meet him at your villa. But I’m afraid I—can’t. It was very good of you to expect me, but I shan’t be coming. So I’d be awfully grateful if you’d forgive me. And when he comes, you’ll explain to him that I rang?’

  ‘Sure. Sure thing. Sorry not to meet you, though,’ said Elsie Cash easily. ‘Rendle will be disappointed too. We could have had a party—Still, another time? We’re here for a month. Are you staying long?’

  ‘No. I’m going back to England on Thursday.’

  ‘You’ve been on holiday?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Fran explained her circumstances and Mrs. Cash clucked with sympathy and said, ‘Well, a pity you can’t make it, but Rendle is sure to forgive you. Tell you something? We suspect that in his quiet way, he’s nuts about you—Anyway, do you know, I’ve an idea you’re wise not to come over here tonight. I can see something awfully off-putting happening outside.’

  ‘Off-putting? What do you mean?’ asked Fran.

  ‘Well, a sort of thick fog, coming in off the sea. Rolling in at quite a rate, and it’s getting dark a lot too early. It was low down on the sea, but now it’s like a blanket everywhere. Honestly!’ Elsie Cash’s voice squeaked in disgust. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve come two thousand miles to catch the sun and collected a London pea-souper instead!’

  From where Fran stood she had only a very narrow view out of the bar doorway. But—sand-fog to contend with on her way back? Oh, please not! she begged her fate. She told Mrs. Cash,

  ‘It’ll be what they call a sand-fog—sand off the Sahara, blown in off the mainland on the east wind. It can be as thick as fog and quite nasty. But I’ve only seen the makings of one in all the months I’ve been here. And though it’s not much consolation to you if you’re just above the bay, it doesn’t penetrate very far inland, I believe.

  ‘Big deal, I’m sure!’

  ‘And I understand,’ Fran passed on the island joke, ‘it doesn’t whip up any camels and bring them over too.’

  The quip fell flat on its face. ‘Camels? Well, how could it?’ puzzled Mrs. Cash, and then, ‘Oh, excuse me, will you? My husband has just come in and he’ll never wait for his first drink. ’Night!’ Fran rang off, paid for the call, thanked the proprietor and went out to the car. He followed her out into the brown blanket that was the atmosphere.

  ‘The senorita has far to drive?’

  She smiled. ‘Farther than I like—in this,’ she told him. ‘To the Quinta de los Santos, where—’

  ‘The Quinta de los Santos? Don Diego de Matteor? That is a long way, senorita. But if you must travel, why do you not go by the mountain road?’

  ‘This way will be much the shorter.’

  The man shrugged. ‘Agreed, but the other might be the clearer. The niebla arenisca hangs low, and once through it towards the heights you would be safer, I think.’

  But on the chance that she might have to cope with both the hazards of the mountain road as well as with the fog, Fran persisted in her decision and they parted on a cordial ‘Hasta la vista.’

  She was able to drive at no more than a crawl. Only after she had left the bodegon some way behind did it occur to her that she ought to have telephoned Raquel. And only after she had gone too far to turn back did she admit her folly in going against the man’s advice to seek the clearer air above sea-level. The little traffic she met was merely a sounding horn, which she answered with her own, and a mist-around-the-moon glow of headlights, and she was overtaken by nothing. But to her inexperience, driving into the blankness ahead was terrifying, more than her nerves could stand.

  No help to be had until she reached the next telephone, and where was that? She braked and sat still, collecting herself, then remembered that on her picnic day out with Gil it had been on this shore that they had sighted the earlier sand-fog and from this road that they had escaped it by turning off inland and climbing.

  But where had they turned off? Had she already passed the road they took? Or by some good fortune hadn’t she yet reached it? If she found it, would she recognize it? Since there was no answer but to go on and see, she went on.

  At last—there, surely? She slewed the wheel over and turned into the branch-road, neither hoping for nor gaining any advantage for a while. The road itself seemed narrower and the surface rougher than she remembered, but that could be her inexpert driving compared with Gil’s. She lurched on until she was no longer in doubt that, after all, she had chosen the wrong road. This one was dwindling to a mere track, hemmed in by pines and gnarled olives, and though she judged its direction to be roughly correct, it was no way for a car to travel further.

  She braked and went gingerly into reverse, back to a point where she thought she would have space for turning; a slight widening of the track which would have offered no problem to a better driver than she.

  But, nervous and over-anxious, she manoeuvred badly; needed more room than there was for the turn and at the climax of her reverse, felt the back wheels thump down over the rough edge of the track, a good foot below its level.

  Frantically she did all she knew, but the wheels only spun and churned deeper. Without help she couldn’t hope to get the car back on to the track, and what prospect had she of help coming to her there?

  She looked at her watch and calculated times. As she hadn’t telephoned Raquel to say she was on her way back, she wouldn’t be missed until her own promised time of return. ‘Before dinner’ she had said in her note, so there would be no alarm for her yet. That meant she had until around nine o’clock to do something practical about getting back. But what? With the car out of action, there was only one answer to that. She must walk. But which way? On along the track? It must strike the main mountain road somewhere. Or back to the shore road by the way she had come?

  Since the latter was a known quantity, she chose it, but was oddly reluctant to leave the car for the early sub-tropical darkness which was already supplanting the false twilight of the sand-fog. How far was it back to the shore road where, if she was seen, she might hope to flag down a passing car? Three kilometres? Four? She felt very forlorn as she set out.

  The trees seemed to press in on her and the only sounds were her own footsteps and the ceaseless whirr of cicadas in the undergrowth. She expected to meet nothing until she reached the shore road. But when she had gone about a kilometre she believed she could hear a car. She halted, listening, and had her hope confirmed when a gleam of light winked between the trees, then raked their trunks, and a car rocked and bucketed towards her.

  Some other innocent, trying to escape the sand-fog? Or—? She stepped into range of the headlights, but the hand she raised in signal dropped suddenly to her side. The car was Gil’s! Gil? How? Why here? He couldn’t possibly be looking for her. There hadn’t been time for him to know!

  But Gil it was. Gil out of the car, his hand a vice on her shoulder, shaking it, and his surprise at seeing her to be felt almost as a physical thing, exploding into anger.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘You took Aunt Lucia’s car. Where is it?’

  ‘Back there.’ She jerked her head. ‘I’m afraid I ditched it, trying to turn. I thought this was a road, but it isn’t one. You can’t get much farther along it than I did.’

  ‘As if I didn’t know that! But where were you trying to go? Where have you been?’

  ‘I was on my way back from Las Rocas.’

  ‘You didn’t go to Las Rocas!’

  ‘Oh, I did—’ She stopped, trying to work it out. ‘What makes you think I didn’t? And where were you going yourself?’

  ‘Chasing you, what do you think? And did you, or did you not, telephone this villa to say you weren’t going over there after all?’

  ‘Yes, but I was nearly there when I changed my mind and I rang up from the first bodegon I came to on the way back. But how do you know I did?’

  ‘From your friend Jervis. When he arr
ived himself he got your message and rang the Quinta to say he was glad you hadn’t gone because the whole coast was thick with sand-fog. But why hadn’t you? I was there when Aunt Raquel told him that as far as she knew, you had gone. At any rate, you weren’t at home and you had taken the car, so if you hadn’t arrived, where were you?’

  ‘I could have been anywhere,’ suggested Fran faintly.

  ‘Exactly. Anywhere. But if you had only gone into the town you had been too long away, and with the whole east coast, as I knew, enveloped in fog, on the off-chance you were making for Las Rocas, that was where you were likely to be lost.’

  ‘I went over by the mountain road, in fact.’

  ‘We weren’t to know that, were we? Anyway, I raced over, rang back to hear you hadn’t gone home, sent Jervis scouting the top road for you and took the shore road myself. I was lucky ... I stopped off at a bodegon and described you; heard you had telephoned someone from there and then came on your way, against the advice of the chap there that you would have been wiser to make for the mountain road.’

  ‘I know. I was silly not to,’ murmured Fran.

  Gil agreed grimly, ‘Silly is right. But when this fellow said I wasn’t far behind you in time, and my car is faster, I knew I’d be sure to overtake you if you were on the road at all. Then, when I saw what the fog condition was, I gave you credit for enough sense to try to get up to the mountain road instead. I banked on your remembering where you and I had turned off, one day. But when I followed that hunch and there was still no sign of you, I realized you hadn’t, and I went back. Then I spotted this lane. Supposing, I argued, you had missed the real turning or hadn’t been looking for it when you passed it, you might still have remembered and thought this was it. So I try it—and here you are, walking!’ he finished in disgust.

  ‘Oh, Gil, I’m sorry.’ She wondered if he realized he was still gripping her shoulder and she put her hand over his. ‘Don’t. You’re hurting me,’ she said.

  ‘And so you deserve.’ He released her, but continued to glare down at her, as if he needed to memorize every feature of her face. He drew a sharp breath. Then, suddenly and incredibly, his arms went about her; his mouth found hers, demanding and taking, and he was hurting—exquisitely—more than her shoulder in the passionate tyranny of his embrace.

  And she was giving too ... in an ache of response to his lips, to the questions of his searching hands and the little murmured incoherencies that made him defenceless, vulnerable as never before.

  At last they stood apart. He said in a kind of wonder, ‘You ... wanted ... too? Me? Like that?’

  This wasn’t Gil—supplicating, hesitant, unsure of his welcome! But it was good to pretend it might be. She nodded. ‘You. Too. Like that,’ she said.

  ‘Then why—?’ A touch of the old assurance now, but he didn’t finish the question. He held open the door of his car for her. ‘Get in,’ he ordered. ‘We’re on our way home.’

  ‘What about Aunt Lucia’s car? I’m afraid it will need jacking up before it can be moved.’

  ‘Leave it. It can wait.’ As he took his own seat the smile he threw her was a promise in itself.

  ‘Chica—’

  Fran’s eyes lighted. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nothing. Just chica mia,’ he said, then gave all his attention to turning in the narrow compass of the track.

  CHAPTER IX

  The silence between them held until they reached the shore road where the lifting fog was no menace now.

  ‘No camels, you see,’ commented Gil.

  Fran’s lips curved to a smile. ‘A pity. I’d have liked a camel or two.’

  ‘What would you do with a camel, pray?’

  ‘Ride it in the desert, why not?’

  ‘No desert,’ said Gil.

  After that, silence again, though Fran’s whimsy felt that thoughts and questions must be ballooning between them as in a strip cartoon. Then when the lights of El Naranjal town were to be seen as a glow in the sky ahead, Gil pulled up at a bodegon. ‘I’m going to ring them to say I’ve found you and I’m bringing you home,’ he explained, and went in. Gone longer than she expected, he came back. As if he had made no break he went on, ‘But not yet. You and I have a lot to say to each other, young Fran.’ And then, looking at her more closely, ‘You’re trembling! All over! Why?’

  With an effort she controlled the telltale quiver of her chin, the fluttering of her wrists. ‘It’s nothing. Nerves—just silliness.’

  ‘You need a drink.’

  ‘No, please—’

  ‘Coffee, then?’ He glanced back at the bodegon. ‘Here? Will this do? It’s not much of a place inside.’

  She wanted to say that, with him, a hole in the wall would do. But the only word her lips would frame was ‘Yes ’.

  The bar was dim, the floor sanded and they sat at an oilcloth-covered table ringed with old stains. But there were no other customers and when the barman had brought coffee for Fran and brandy for Gil, they were alone.

  He watched her drink half the cupful before he drank himself. Then he said, ‘Jervis was there—at home.’

  ‘Oh dear, was he?’

  ‘After not finding you on the mountain road, he’d naturally gone on there to see if you were back. I made all the proper apologetic noises for dragging him away from his evening at Las Rocas, and then I told him about us.’

  ‘Gil, not just like that! Not over the phone?’

  ‘Why not? He had to know some time.’

  ‘What—what did he say?’

  ‘Believe it or not, “Let the best man win” or something equally English and stiff-upper-lip. And when I said that was handsome of him, considering that from time to time, you’d given me fair reason to be jealous of him, he said he’d known all along that you were no more than lukewarm about him, and though he was disappointed, he wasn’t surprised—’

  ‘About us? He must have been surprised!’

  ‘He claimed not. In his own words—“Because”, he said, “in my experience you de Matteors have only to want something to be so, and it is. And if you’ve meant to get Fran, as you say you have, the poor girl never had a chance.” Then he asked me to remind you that England would still be there when you wanted it, and we rang off. Fran, why did you run straight to him from Grandfather? From what Grandfather told you this afternoon and from what he asked of you, and you refused?’

  Fran gestured emptily. ‘I think because by contrast Rendle looked sane and English and—balanced, against something that was shaming and fantastic and cruel. Alien and hateful—’

  She stopped, groping for some clue, some thread which, just short of her mind’s grasp of it, she had let slip. Still seeking it—‘You—knew what Grandfather threatened to do to you if I refused to stay here?’ she breathed.

  ‘I knew, chica.’

  ‘And you let him?’

  He smiled. ‘I laid it on. I asked him to.’

  ‘You—?’ Words utterly failed her as his hands went out to take both hers across the shabby table.

  ‘Desperate ills, desperate remedies, my darling,’ he said. ‘Your flag-wagging Englishman is right, and I’ve told you so myself—neither Grandfather nor I are above devious methods to get what we want. I had to have his help. I thought you would be awed into giving in, if you believed he would commit the monstrous injustice of cutting me out of his will. But it doesn’t seem to have worked.’

  ‘I still don’t understand! Did you know too that he had remembered about us—that night at his bedside?’

  Gil shook his head. ‘He hadn’t. He hasn’t yet. I had to tell him all that we both promised him that night.’

  ‘He let me think he had remembered, and he made me feel so ashamed of lying to him, promising him something we shouldn’t carry out if he had died.’

  ‘I wasn’t lying when I told him I was in love with you. Were you—about me?’

  ‘No. But you must have been. There’s Elena Merced—’

  ‘There wasn’t Elena. There hasn’t
been, for a long time. Listen—’ Gil looked deep into her eyes—‘if I’m not in love with you, then Dante wasn’t with Beatrice. Nor Romeo. Nor Tristan. Nor—nor Abelard. Look, do I have to sound like a digest of the World’s Great Love Stories to convince you, chica? And be fair, am I doubting you, after the way we kissed tonight?’

  Fran laughed shakily. ‘You don’t have to. Without knowing it, I think I’ve been in love with you ever since I was fourteen. But you—’ You’re so prickly and critical of me and intolerant, and we fight so much.’

  ‘Just a symptom of the disease,’ he countered airily. ‘I fight you for jealousy of you and because I expect so much of you. And I shall fight you again, make no mistake, if ever another Rendle Jervis looms on the skyline and hovers. Look at how you’ve brandished him at me, and how you ran to him tonight!’

  ‘I’ve told you, he was only a kind of refuge when the rest of you were too much for me. But it was different between you and Elena. Now you have brandished her, and not only to me. Even Grandfather thinks you mean to marry her in defiance of him.’

  ‘He doesn’t any longer. He has known about you and me since you first announced you were going back to England. As for Elena, I was only beholden to her genius, though I did flaunt her to assert my right to choose my own woman and in my own time. It was only when I knew for sure that you were my woman that I saw I hadn’t the right to make use of her so, and I broke with her weeks ago.’

  Fran said wonderingly, ‘That was how it was with me tonight, over Rendle. Suddenly I saw I was only making him a kind of foil, and if he cared for me at all, I mustn’t.’

  ‘So you admit he’s had designs on you?’

  ‘ “Designs”! No, that sounds so calculated.’

  ‘He’s the calculating sort. Well?’

  ‘I think, if we’d seen something of each other in England, he might have asked me to marry him.’

  ‘So you could develop a conscience towards him, but not towards me! You believed Grandfather would cut me off, but you still dug in your heels about leaving?’

  Happiness drained from Fran like an ebbing tide as she wondered how she could have deluded herself that Gil’s loving her solved anything. She said wretchedly, ‘I couldn’t help myself. I can’t still. I have to go.’